It seems that the top tech companies have learnt nothing from the experience of IBM during the 1930s and are happy to help build Donald “Prince of Orange” Trump’s Muslim database.

For those who came in late, in the 1930s Biggish Blue’s German branch made a killing flogging the machines which helped the Nazi regime efficiently funnel Jews, Roma and communists into death camps. After the war, it faced more than a few law suits from those who felt that IBM’s efficient machines had helped kill their loved ones.

It seems that Biggish Blue has forgotten all that. Shortly after the election, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty wrote a personal letter to President-elect Trump in which she offered her congratulations, and more importantly, the services of her company.

The six different areas she identified as potential business opportunities between a Trump White House and IBM and while these were all harmless they sparked the resignation of a senior content strategist named Elizabeth Wood.

“Your letter offered the backing of IBM’s global workforce in support of his agenda that preys on marginalised people and threatens my well-being as a woman, a Latina and a concerned citizen. The president-elect has demonstrated contempt for immigrants, veterans, people with disabilities, Black, Latin, Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ communities,” she wrote. “These groups comprise a growing portion of the company you lead, Ms. Rometty. They work every day for IBM’s success and have been silenced by your words,” she wrote.

The Intercept wondered if Big Tech would face similar issues and asked nine of the most prominent such firms, from Facebook to Booz Allen Hamilton if they would sell their services to help create a national Muslim registry, an idea recently resurfaced by Donald Trump’s transition team. Only Twitter said no.

This surprised the Intercept which thought that such a project would provide American technology companies an easy line to draw in the sand. After all tracking individuals purely on the basis of their religious beliefs is pretty much a non-brainer, even to the moral pigmies of corporate America.

To be fair, those surveyed including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton, SGI and SRA International basically refused to answer. But it seems that only Twitter was prepared to come up with the right answer. Namely it was company policy to prohibit anyone the use of “Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period”.

Microsoft in the past has said that it was committed to promoting not just diversity and that “it will remain important for those in government and the tech sector to continue to work together to strike a balance that protects privacy and public safety in what remains a dangerous time”.

The word on the information strasse is that Google wants to buy Facebook. It is entirely speculative, but could have legs.

Information leaked to Fudzilla suggests that talks are well advanced between the two companies.

Anecdotal evidence from many Facebook users sugges that talks are well advanced and the companies are already sharing experimental data, between themselves, of user data.Other sources suggest that Microsoft (Vole) is also interested in Facebook and, conversely, that Facebook is interested in buying Microsoft.

None of the companies cared enough to comment to Fudzilla at press time.

The European Commission was approached by Microsoft in an attempt to appease antitrsut regulators investigating its proposed takeover of Linkedin.

The Commission met Microsoft last week and now Microsoft has responded, although the nature of the concessions it offered are unclear.

The proposed $28 billion deal was challenged by Salesforce, which had wanted to buy Linkedin too. Salesforce claimed that Microsoft taking Linkedin over would threaten fair competition in the European market.

Microsoft wants Linkedin because it would add job seeking to its portfolio which it is seeking to broaden.

Reutersbelieves that Microsoft has told the European Commission that there’s plenty of competition in the field, particularly from social networking giant Facebook.

Facebook has announced that PayPal will become one of the payment options within its Messenger service.

Last spring, the company introduced a way for users to add payment information into the messaging app to send peer-to-peer payments to friends and contacts. This is a move similar to those by PayPal’s own app, along with its Venmo app, Square, Google, and Snapchat, among others.

As of the third quarter, PayPal has more than 192 million accounts active worldwide, while Facebook’s Messenger service is currently used by a billion users. Some reports claim that 40 percent of US mobile users are now on the company’s messaging platform.

PayPal will be integrated with Messenger only in the US for now, though it could be particularly useful in developing countries that rely on mobile transactions as well. The company has yet to comment on timeframes for international availability.

Facebook has partnered with PayPal in the past as a payment method for merchants to buy Facebook ads, along with integration within the Oculus store and with Uber’s integration into Messenger. The company says that Messenger integration is now beginning to roll out in the US and should allow customers to access their PayPal transactions and receipts from within the app.

Social Notworking outfit Facebook got into trouble when it was claimed that humans picking the news were biased against US conservatives, so the humans were replaced by an algorithm.

Now it seems the algorithm prefers news that is made up but is loved by the great unwashed who can’t tell the difference.

The Washington Post has been recording which topics were trending for on the platform for the last few weeks.It seems that the top five stories which the site is claiming are news stories are works of fiction.

Four accounts were tracked from 31 August to 22 September. During that time, the Post uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate.

“On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record,” the Post muttered.

They got on the blower to one of the sacked people who used to oversee trending who said he was not surprised as the functionality of the algorithm was different from what Facebook expects.

“It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code. Facebook personalises its trends to each user but the observation that Facebook periodically trends fake news still stands — if anything, we’ve underestimated how often it occurs."

A lot of the stories are aggregated by neo-nazi groups hoping to spread their usual race hate. But there were also stories which claimed that the iPhone had magical powers. This was circulated by Apple Fanboys who thought it was true but it came from one of those “made up news” sites which Americans mistakenly call satire.

Facebook trended a news release from the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons” — a discredited libertarian medical organization and a story claiming that the September 11 attacks were a “controlled demolition”.

Facebook’s Trending feature is supposed to serve as a snapshot of the day’s most important and most-discussed news, made possible by a combination of algorithms and a team of editors. One algorithm surfaces unusually popular topics, a human examines and vets them, and another algorithm surfaces the approved stories for people who will be most interested.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been showing off what he dubbed the company’s mobile VR future.

Talking to the Oculus Connect developers conference, Zuckerburg demonstrated a prototype stand-alone VR headset and he mentioned the world “affordable”.

The main feature of the new prototype standalone headset was its positional tracking. In fact it was a modified Rift with a compute module embedded into the back. This positional tracking technology allows the headset to understand where it is in physical space and adjust the onscreen content.

Positional tracking allows you to walk through an experience and see it from every angle. Zuckerberg said development is still incredibly early, but that it’s on the product roadmap.

Positional tracking has previously only been available on the major high-end VR headsets including Oculus’s Rift headset, the HTC Vive and PS VR, but with this announcement Oculus is closing the gap between mobile VR experiences and their high-powered counterparts.

Positional tracking on mobile is a technology it is rather hard on the battery and it was a difficult problem to fix. There were no details given a potential launch date either.

Before the start of the weekend, Facebook announced some notable changes to the way its social network would be handling “Trending” news topics, which previously contained topic descriptions curated by staff members and were verified through a non-algorithmic editing process.

Image source: Facebook Newsroom

News topics are now automated, but content curation still human-driven

On Friday, the company said it would be making its newsfeed “more automated” by placing control over relevance and popularity into the hands of its algorithms, rather than requiring staff members to write long editorial descriptions of each trending topic around the clock. This basically means that news stories like “Mars” and “Louisiana Flood” will only show the amount of people sharing information about them in any given moment, but will not give story descriptions unless a user hovers over the links.

Image source: Facebook Newsroom

Instead of Facebook writing the descriptions, its algorithms will now pull a short description directly from the content of a top trending original news story. Human editors will still, however, be responsible for making sure that the topics supplied by its algorithms are categorically relevant to its various news topics, without interference from popular day-to-day hashtags like #lunch or #MusicMonday, for example.

Algorithm-controlled trending topics may avert political focus

The move to an AI-focused news curating process comes during a time when the company was recently criticized for routinely down-ranking particular news results while curating which stories appeared, and that it “often depended on the taste of individual supervisors,” according to NPR. Facebook responded to the editorial screening accusations with a direct statement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another from Tom Stocky, director of Trending Topics.

Of course, the big question is whether the social networking company can fully address the former allegations with the new changes made to its more autonomous newsfeed design. The company formally claims there was no alleged political bias in its product after thorough investigation, but this conclusion is a topic of interest much left to the discretion of its users at large.

The company now alleges, “Still, making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics. Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we’re committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics.”

The dafter elements of the social notworking outfit Facebook seem to think that the written word has had its day and we will be using video messaging instead.

Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa told a London conference that in five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.She said that the best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, is video because it conveys so much more information in a much quicker period.

She said that the written word won’t disappear entirely, because "you will have to write for the video.”

However, there are a few things that video is not good at. The first thing is that you have to sit down and dedicate time to watching it. You can’t skim read. It also takes a lot more time to watch a video than it does to read text.

Most people read silently considerably faster than they hear something outloud. So rather than getting more information you are absorbing less. Looking at the Facebook news feed read many times more posts than I watch videos. I also would not bother with Facebook if all I had to look at was videos.

Mendelsohn thinks that the shift to video will arrive along with Virtual Reality, but I would not hold your breath.

Despite the Tame Apple press claiming that Apple is the most innovative company in the world, it is an also ran behind Samsung, IBM and Google.

According to the number of patents that are applied for each year, Apple is only ranked seventh with 1,060 patents and there is a huge difference between it and IBM’s 3167.

Although IBM’s patent-producing power slowed somewhat in 2015, the number of patents it has received so far this year is up more than 13 per cent compared to a year earlier. It is also involved in a number of key scientific research projects. IBM accounted for about 1 per cent of all US patents awarded in 2015 or parents.

Samsung was 300 patents behind IBM, which means it is three times more innovative than Apple, despite failing to invent the rounded rectangle.

Google received well over 3,000 patents in 2015, more than 11 times the number it received just five years earlier. Google is getting into more fields of research, from AI, cars, drones and embedded computers.

Facebook, received just seven patents in 2010, and 389 in 2015 which is a 55 times increase.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has met several high-profile conservative figures in US politics in a bid to convince them that he was not really fixing it so their news was not being properly presented on the social networking site.

The site has been accused of tampering with its Trending Topics feature, promoting "progressive" views and websites over content presenting views from the god-fearing American right.

Zuckerberg denied the reports - which first appeared on tech news site Gizmodo but he did say that the feature was controlled by human editors rather than a popularity algorithm.

So he invited “more than a dozen leading conservatives to talk about how we can make sure Facebook continues to be a platform for all ideas across the political spectrum.”

“Silicon Valley has a reputation for being liberal. But the Facebook community includes more than 1.6 billion people of every background and ideology - from liberal to conservative and everything in between. We've built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas. Our community's success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want. It doesn't make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them."

What Zuckerburg wanted was to place the following conservatives in one room – conspiracy nut Glenn Beck, Fox News presenter Dana "Snowden is a Traitor" Perino, Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney's campaign bloke, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump advisor Barry Bennett.

It seems that no-one at any point decided that it would be a good idea to save the world from a pile of suck and blow up the entire building. Perhaps it was because Zuckerburg could not attract all the conservatives he wanted to his meeting, maybe Jesus told them not to be there, or they were frightened of meeting transgender people in the loos.

Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and former Bush campaign aide wrote in a statement: "We will not be attending this meeting. We know one meeting cannot possibly resolve all of the above mentioned issues." So showing up at no meeting at all is going to help the process start.